This is a day I would never want to see again.
An uneasy calm hung over Kabul since the morning. I felt restless, as I used to even at home when I did not find a story to file. I stepped out of the hotel for a bit, only to find myself again in the midst of a meaningless crowd just walking to and fro aimlessly. And everyone seemed scared. I wanted to speak to people, but my attempts were of no use. So I returned to the hotel. I also wanted to have some time to myself. Covering a war zone is not easy, and some days feel heavier , especially the relatively calmer days. But journalists do not have the luxury to sit back and relax, so mentally I was still searching for stories.
All appointments and meetings with senior government officials kept getting cancelled and all their key aides started to go phantom. I kept pushing for an interview with Abdullah, which was promised by his team before my trip. I was told I would get one as soon as he was back from Doha. Reports from the Qatari capital were not sounding very positive as the peace talks with the Taliban had almost collapsed and prospects of a power-sharing deal looked grim. And all the while the Taliban was claiming provincial capitals and cities, one after another.
Back on ground zero, the Taliban took over Ghazni, and that literally shook Kabul. I knew something was amiss when some of my sources in the Kabul government told me they were packing their bags, while some sought my assistance to secure a temporary Indian visa before they could make their way to the West. But how could I have told them that I myself was unsure of getting any help from the Indian embassy there if the Taliban took over Kabul? I was being constantly told by the mission that there was no evacuation happening. It was only when the actual exercise took place that I realised it was incorrect on my part to blindly believe them. The embassy, I learnt later, had been in evacuation mode since August 14, after Ghani fled from the country.
The then US chargé d’affaires in Afghanistan, Ross Wilson, was quoted as saying, “The Taliban’s statements in Doha do not resemble their actions in Badakhshan, Ghazni, Helmand and Kandahar . . . Attempts to monopolise power through violence, fear and war will only lead to international isolation.” Wilson and his team at the embassy in Kabul had sent a dissent cable on July 13, 2021, warning of a possible takeover of Kabul by the Taliban.
The conquest of Ghazni, which was the tenth provincial capital that gave in under Taliban pressure, was the easiest task for the Taliban as its then governor Daoud Laghmani simply handed it over to the Taliban forces. Subsequently, he was arrested by the Afghan government in the outskirts of Kabul. The city of Ghazni had been under the Taliban forces for several months and the Afghan government had been controlling only the provincial office and a few governmental facilities. Now those fell too.
Kabul was abuzz with murmurs that President Ghani was stepping down from his post. The Afghan army was falling like a pack of cards, and Afghans in Kabul, inside university campuses, hotels, restaurants, salons and markets, were saying the Taliban could enter the capital city any moment and there was nobody to defend it. Those who had the money for it were already hunting for air tickets to flee the country, calling their relatives in the US, Europe, Canada and Australia to make a place for them and arrange for jobs and permits for them there.
It was a strange environment that day in Kabul. People I knew and called friends . . . nearly all were packing their bags to leave. Some still had faith in the Afghan government, while some – and they were the educated class who worked with the former government – wanted to give the Taliban a “second chance”, should it govern in a democratic manner. This felt strange to me. Back home in India, the news on Afghanistan suggested there was total chaos in the country. My family was beginning to worry for my safety, and by now my mother had completely given up hope about me. Had it not been for my husband, my mother would have had a nervous breakdown.
But to me, sitting in Kabul, the city appeared completely peaceful. It was calm and serene and people seemed to already have their respective Plan Bs ready. I guess this is what it means to be truly resilient – where you don’t panic, don’t get nervous, but silently make your escape plans. However, it is also true that while the upper middle class, the rich and the elite of Kabul had a Plan B, for the poorer lot it was a “do or die” kind of situation. Like all the poor in this unfortunate world, they were helpless. But for the poor of Afghanistan, it also meant having a government that would be proscribed by every country as well as the UN. And being ruled by a banned entity meant having restricted access to food and basic necessities of life, living in perpetual poverty.
Once again, to get a sense of the pulse of the people, I reached out to the lady in the salon, the waiters in the Serena and my cab driver, asking them what it would mean for them if the Taliban came knocking on their door. They were very clear, almost with a sense of surety, that this would not be the Taliban that had ruled earlier, from 1996 to 2001. They argued that this Taliban would know that they were coming back in a changed Afghanistan, a modern-day twenty-first-century Afghanistan where women and men were bold, beautiful and hardworking, knew what they wanted and whom they wanted to rule them, and would not give in to any kind of suppression. The guns did not scare them any longer, nor the bombs, and they knew they would be successful in asking the Taliban to have a democratic government. Somewhere deep in their minds they still nurtured the hope that there would be a “power-sharing deal”, a “peace deal”, that would come of the intra-Afghan talks that were still continuing in Doha.
Meanwhile, the lights in Doha continued to turn dimmer and dimmer. After a rigorous two or three days of talks, they finally ended that night with no tangible outcome in sight even as the Taliban continued to gallop across the north, south, east and west of Afghanistan and seemed very near Kabul. It is no wonder that the US, China and a handful of other countries urged the Afghan government to close the talks and wrap up the peace process as a “matter of urgency”. The much-touted intra-Afghan talks, fanned by the Americans as the next step following the peace deal, seemed to be crumbling fast.
Excerpted with permission from The Fall of Kabul: Despatches from Chaos, Nayanima Basu, Bloomsbury India.